Your Essential Physical Quality Checklist for Shoes

Footwear manufacturing is an extremely diverse industry, which includes athletic shoes, industrial safety footwear, dress shoes and many more. However, all of these different shoes share one aspect: any footwear you produce must meet your quality assurance specifications.

The only way to ensure that your footwear meets your specifications is to subject them to product inspections and testing, by qualified staff and in a certified quality assurance laboratory. The following is a list of the most important physical tests that your shoes should undergo.

Size and Fitting

The shoes you produce must match all the dimensions corresponding to the appropriate shoe size. If you sell your shoe as a US size 42, and it has the correct heel to toe length but is too narrow - then that batch cannot be shipped. To avoid costly rework, such errors must be identified before your production run starts.

Metal Contamination

No matter how strict controls your factory has, a stray needle or work tool can find its way into a shoe - and a single foreign metal object is enough for an entire order to be rejected. Suitable testing with metal detection will catch such foreign objects in time.

Bond Testing

Shoes are constructed of many different parts that are all bonded or glued together. Maintaining a consistent level of quality for different fastening processes can be difficult. Before shipping your footwear, you must ensure that it is able to withstand consistent and adequate levels of stress without breaking.

Zip and Fastener Fatigue and Quality Testing

After putting a great deal of effort into ensuring durable footwear construction, you don’t want to be let down by a failing zip or fastener. Any fastener you put on your shoe must undergo a durability test to ensure that its lifetime of opening and closing matches the durability of your shoe.

Accessory Pull Testing

Any accessory or component that you add to a shoe, such as a decorative buckle, must be attached securely. An improperly attached accessory will not only damage the appearance of the shoe, but may be swallowed by a child, resulting in an expensive and reputation-damaging recall of your product.

Color Fastness - Rub Testing

This test ensures that any coloring used in the manufacturing of your shoe will not leak or bleed onto the wearer, their clothes, or their surroundings. After a walk in the rain, no-one wants to take off their shoes to find their white socks have turned pink. This test will ensure that the color of your shoes stays on your shoes only.

QIMA - The Complete Solution

QIMA is a turnkey solution for quality control and assurance, including physical and chemical testing of your shoes in accredited laboratories. With our secure in-house testing facilities and certified partners in 120 countries around the world, we are able to provide you industry-leading, accredited physical testing and quality assurance with extremely fast turnaround times.

Whichever type of footwear you manufacture, we can get you the results and the quality you need, as and when you need them.

In addition, we help you manage your quality assurance and testing processes on the go, with our our mobile app for Android and iOS. You no longer need to make calls or wait for an email to know the exact status of your order. With our app, you can:

Seamlessly book product inspections, lab testing and supplier audits Instantly see results and full reports